Using FoundryVTT to run a Fate Game (Secrets of Cats)

FoundryVTT is a new-to-market virtual tabletop for playing RPGs. It has been in production for a long time now, over in Patreon. It will get out of beta this month, releasing on May 22, 2020.

Foundry is open to modification from users. The community has contributed many modules, gaming systems, and quality-of-life of improvements. If you have reasonable JavaScript skills, you can write your own.

I have a strong dislike of Roll20, so I preordered Foundry, spun up a server, and got to putting it through its paces.

The main screen for the players. Everyone loved using the yarn as Fate points.

How to run Fate in Foundry

While there is a Fate system in development for Foundry, it isn’t ready for use yet. For my game, I used the generic default gaming system—”World-building”.

For character sheets, I added “attributes” for each skill the character has. This allowed me to write a script for rolling skills. This script definitely required writing some JavaScript, which I’ve shared in this gist.

My players used the description area to better flesh out the character sheets.

Doing skills this way is not a requirement. I did it this way as a quality-of-life improvement for my players. (And I wanted to dive into Foundry’s API.) Players can simply enter in dice rolls by hand using the syntax /r 4df+4 instead.

List of modules used

There is a wealth of modules for Foundry, allowing you to customize it to your preferences. I’m still getting the lay of the land, but here are the modules I’m using: